


The Key

by sophinisba



Category: Fur (2006)
Genre: 1000-5000 Words, Fairy Tales, Feminist Themes, Gen, Yuletide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-25
Updated: 2008-12-25
Packaged: 2017-10-07 21:10:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,090
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/69283
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sophinisba/pseuds/sophinisba
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There once was a girl who learned that, since she was a girl, she must know her place and stay there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Key

**Author's Note:**

  * For [speccygeekgrrl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/speccygeekgrrl/gifts).



> Many thanks to Baranduin, who watched this movie so she could beta the fic.

There once was a girl who learned that, since she _was_ a girl, she must know her place and stay there. Her parents didn't teach her this themselves because they were important people and far too busy to spend time telling old stories to children. But she was a clever girl and her parents brought her all the books she asked for.

The girl, whose name was Diane, read about the young woman who opened a box, just to see what was inside, and let all the evil out into the world. She read of the girl who was raped and starved, and by eating a bit of fruit condemned half the world to cold and darkness. She read of another woman who shared a piece of fruit with her beloved and so brought sin and suffering to her own kind forever.

She read another story that was only centuries old, not millennia. It came from the winter of Europe, after the people had forgotten about the old world (with its sad stories and its city-states) and before they'd reached the new world across the sea where later they'd send their hopes and fears. In this story a young bride was given a key and told not to use it. Then she was left to explore the house on her own - this house that was larger than any in her village, larger than what she could explore in a single day, this house that, so they said, belonged to her now that she'd married that great bear of a man with his blue-black beard and his red-white gleaming teeth. Diane held her breath as she turned the page, and the woman in the story turned the great key and opened the tiny door. Both women knew that what they found on the other side would not be good, but they were curious creatures and would not be deterred.

The bodies hung on the walls of the little room did not bring evil into the world, for it had been there for a long time by then. But the blood of so many curious dead women stained the key and stained the bride's hands, and no matter how fast she fled, no matter how hard she scrubbed, she could not get them clean. When her husband came home he beat her bloody and tossed her by her hair into the little room to wait with her dead sisters. He said he'd come back for her later.

Diane shut the book and put it away.

The obedient girl grew into an obedient woman. She did as her parents told her, and when she married she did as her husband asked. Even though she lived in the biggest and most terrible of the new world's terrible big cities, her father and husband kept her safe inside one home and then another (in pieces of houses, for there were so many people in that city that they had to live on top of one another, even if they were as rich as Bluebeard).

When she became a mother she even took the time to sit with her daughters and read them stories, though these were safer stories with no blood in them. She taught them in her own gentle way and they learned the lesson as well as she had. She also helped the young women who worked for her husband to look safe and beautiful, to wear make-up without turning into cheap painted ladies, to tame a wild animal by wearing its skin, posing and smiling just so.

Then one day a key came into her hand, and Diane held it for several minutes before she threw it away. She would not be the cat killed by curiosity or the beauty devoured by the beast. She sent it away with the refuse from the pipes, but all that day she kept staring at her hands, thinking the mark must show and her husband would know.

But when Diane couldn't stand it anymore and went to explain herself, her husband said he was happy she'd found a new room to explore. And the man who lived upstairs, the one who'd sent her the key, who was not a beast but a man brave and beautiful as a lion, said it was time she learned to unlock the secrets inside herself. She drank his strange tea and ate his food, but she did not shrink or grow monstrous, and the world did not fall into ice and darkness. Instead, he bathed her in clean water and wrapped her in soft fur, and Diane grew warm and then hot as she wrapped herself in him, rubbed herself against him, opened her locks, opened her eyes.

When the Lion swam away from the coast of the new world forever, he left behind a coat of his own long, thick hair so Diane could keep herself warm even when she was alone. She curled up in his coat in his bed in the smallest room of that great house, and she cried herself to sleep, but when she awoke she was not alone at all. The Lion's friends - the dwarves and the twins, the fairies and the dreamers, had come to keep her company.

One of them brought her a new book the Lion had made for her, with empty pages for the things she had yet to see. Then another friend brought her another book, a very old one she hadn't seen since she was a child. Diane read again of the young bride's terror as she hid among the bodies, but this time she kept reading. She read how the evil man met his end, and the brave young woman kept the house to share through a long life with her sisters and her friends and with the kind, beloved man she chose.

Diane closed the books and held them on her lap. One had a happy ending and the other still had to be filled in, and she was glad it was her own story that wasn't yet decided. She looked around her and understood that, even with the Lion gone, she had more friends now than ever before in her life. Perhaps later she'd leave the house with some of them, or perhaps she would go out on her own. But leave she must, for she had a whole new world and its biggest, most beautiful city to explore. She made her own heat, and she would no longer hide in anyone else's skin.


End file.
